


I'll Read to Your Bones

by 221b_hound



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Death from Old Age, Gen, Just because one of them is dead it doesn't mean the other has stopped talking, Not meant to be sad, Old Age, though it is a bit anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 17:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson died six months ago, a very old and very contented man. Sherlock still visits him every day, to talk to him, to read to him, to remember him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Read to Your Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I made a comment on atlinmerrick's LJ about visiting her grave if she predeceases me in order to read Johnlock porn to her bones. She promptly asked me to write a fic about that idea. I promptly did. 
> 
> It's not really meant to be a sad story, though it made me a bit sad to write it.

Six months. One hundred and eighty three days. Four thousand, three hundred and ninety two hours. Sherlock would have counted seconds, too, but they didn't matter so much. He counted out the seconds in words and breaths, sitting on the grass by the headstone.

"You'd have liked this one. It's terrible. Hilarious. The most awful thing." And Sherlock tapped the tablet screen to bring up the review of the latest godawful film someone had made of their lives. Well, not their lives, hardly *their* lives, but the idiots in the picture had their names, and said some of the things they said, but they were, naturally, nothing like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

"There's a fight scene in this one," Sherlock said, pausing during the recitation of the review that, despite all sane evidence to the contrary, insisted that the film was good, "In which I save your life by knowing the words to a popular song. Utter nonsense, obviously. You were always the one who knew the words to pop songs."

Later, Sherlock read letters aloud. From Mycroft's grandson. From Molly. From Molly's daughter. From admirers. Some from detractors too, so that Sherlock could be scathing about their grammar and spelling or cognitive ability, like he always was when he read these things to John back when John was still there to laugh.

When there are no letters and no reviews, Sherlock reads science reports. Or books about bees. Once or twice he has read the kind of trashy novel that John so loved, but that always devolves into a page by page denunciation of the idiocy of the plot, the characters, the writers and the person at the shop who sold it to him.

Six months. One hundred and eighty three days. Four thousand, three hundred and ninety two hours. For as many of those months and days and hours as he can, Sherlock sits by John's headstone and reads to his bones. He know it's sentimental and ridiculous. He knows that John can't hear him. That's not the point. Sherlock isn't sure what the point is, really, or actually, he does, because he used to have a skull to talk to, and then there was John, and now he only has bones again, but these bones have history. These bones heard him talk for fifty years. These bones *knew* him.

So Sherlock reads and talks, because it's like it was, and John is near, even if it's only in Sherlock's memory that this is so.

And on this, the one hundred and eighty third day, Sherlock puts his screen and the letters and the book on the stone. He leans his head against the monument and breathes. And smiles.

And in the afternoon of the one hundred and eighty third day, this is where they find him, still and cold, and smiling. Happy. Because he had the life he wanted, with the friend he had never expected to have, and all things end and that's all right.


End file.
